The weekend was quite literally a doze of euphoria as I’ve waited for far too long.  I grew tired of the endless streams of gameplay videos, media previews, or even official blogs as they no longer satisfy my hunger.  After playing Guild Wars 2’s Beta Weekend Event, I now feel tranquil (or perhaps, withdrawal?)

People say a picture is worth a thousands of words, and I say a weekend of playing is worth a thousands of gameplay videos.  So before I say anything negative, I just want to point that that: It was a pleasure.

Now getting to the point… In this BWE I played only one character–a Charr Engineer of Iron Legion–and put all my time into the vast PvE content  (anyone surprised?  Yes, I’m a carebearcat).  Though the personal story (main story quest chain) ends at lv20 in this beta, I somehow got to lv27… mostly by casually attending dynamic events and complete local quests.  Although the beta experience still upholds my general expectation to Guild Wars 2, there are several major issues, discussed below the cut, that must be addressed by the developers.

Server capacity

ArenaNet temporarily shelved pre-purchasing of the game on their website for a reason.  The reason became obvious a few hours into the BWE on Friday, as the server then became extremely laggy, and consequently had to be rebooted.  Same thing happened on Saturday rather unexpectedly, and this time the server stayed down longer than an hour.

Yet I don’t foresee server capacity to be a huge problem after the launch fever is past.  The solution for heavy traffic should be easy; it is more about quantity of servers, than debugging code or balancing game content.  Either way, players should have the option to switch to a less populated server (for free of course, at launch).  The current “overflow” mechanic works as adding an extra “channel” to a supposedly single-instance zone on a server that experiences high traffic.  A common feature within MMO games, though gameplay reasons, such as how dynamic events favor single instance field on a shard, makes sense.  Yet the system does not have the flexibility of simply switching channels: players have reported that they were separated from their friends and other party members, without ways to get back together other than waiting on a queue to get into the main instance.

The next BWE will definitely have the same amount–if not more–people participating, thus I truly ANet will add more servers by that time.

Game client graphics optimization

This issue has been brought up repeatedly, and ANet is aware of it.  Currently the beta build of the client is badly optimized, and people such as myself, with mid to high tier rigs mostly have low frame rates at crowded areas, while the hardware being under-utilized.  Starter racial starter cities have massive structures, and with the huge influx of new players at start of the beta, I can only categorize the experience as excruciating, seeing my frame rate dropped around 10~15 FPS if I stay in certain area.  It is said that the game is currently CPU-bound and not using enough GPU for whatever it means.  The CPU consumption I was getting is around 80%, yeah… I still think I’d call something CPU-bound if something slaves my Quad Core Q9400 around 100% usage, like Battlefield 3.

Needless to say, this must be fixed.  Good thing is that ANet acknowledged the issue, and I can only assume that they’ll start working on it soon.

PvE Difficulties

Not saying that PvE in GW2 is too hard… but more balancing is much needed.  From what I’m reading gw2guru and the official beta forums, Engineers and Mesmers are the two professions require most player skills to play, while Ranger and Elementalists are the easiest to play in PvE.  I can understand design principles that inevitably make some professions “harder” (as in player skills).  Yet it is rather odd for some Rangers complain the PvE is a “repetitive skill spam”, while I had to do trial-and-error using my skill points the hard way to identify the good and crap skills of my own profession.

Another more observable discrepancy is that the Charr starting areas (lv1~25) are visibly harder than that of Norn’s.  The Norn fields are more open and have less situations where NPC foes are closely cramped up together, which is problematic for all professions, and lethal to ranged professions that rely on kiting.  ANet is aware of this and adjustment is expected in the future.  Hopefully the Salvari and Asura starting areas, which are unavailable during this beta, will be more or less balanced once players are allowed to play those two races.

Melee vs ranged on bosses

Somewhat an extension to the previous topic.  The general design philosophy for GW2’s PvE is: Melee -> higher risk of taking hits but deals more damage, and ranged -> lower risk of taking hits but deals less damage.  It is a simple formula fits GW2’s combat system, which is advertised as a complete lack of traditional “holy trinity”: Tank, DPS, and Healer.

Barring some isolated quirks, melee and ranged attacks work in synergy.  All professions in GW2 can wield at least one ranged weapon; though unsurprisingly, some professions are better at melee and some are at ranged attacks.  The problem arises when most boss creatures in GW2 has nasty PBAoE that makes melee an inferior option compare to dealing damage at a distance.  In theory, melee characters can dodge and use skills to mitigate damage.  But in practice, those bosses hit hard (as much as 2 hits kill a full HP character at same level), and combined with insurmountable distraction as the result of the game rendering a huge amount of overdone particle effects, and higher network latency associated with being in the same place with many other players, this has become a priority issue.

Once again, ArenaNet is noted of the issue.  Though to balancing out melee and ranged skills is no small feat, especially for the possible implication on PvP.  On a plus side, I heard melee and ranged are balanced in pvp, where many players favor to get close up and personal.

GUI and “Hidden Features”

It was a minor frustration to find out about two minor, yet vindicating features of GW2, after the BWE was over.  First of them: crafting materials can be directly “send” to player character’s bank, which has a special vault that stores all kinds of material without cluttering up the normal space.  Another one is the “switch weapon” hot key that supposedly allow the player to have two sets of weapons equipped and swapped at will in combat.  Cruel humor it is, in a sense that these features are of the “if nobody told me it was possible I’ve have never guessed” kind.

Good thing I know them now, so I’ll have less hatred toward managing my inventory during the next BWE.

I suppose the only other beef I have against the GUI department is the camera control.  It looks like a hybrid between GW1 and Tera, where I can only move using 4 directional keys, but without the TPS aim locking scheme that Tera sports.  I really miss the ability to click on ground and move; I think the only reason to remove mouse cursor movement is to make mouse movement tie to camera, like Tera.  But in GW2, right clicking is necessary to move the camera angle, and often than not, holding RMB for an extended amount of time is tiring.  AWSD movement is fine, but having to press F1 to F8 and 1 to 0 keys while moving is asking for either superhuman abilities, or a completely remap of the skill hotkeys.

While ANet has not acknowledge this being on their backlog in any way, I’ll be remapping my keys.  I think F1~F4 can use QERT key, 5~8 change to FGCV, heal to C and elite skill to X.  Not sure about F5~F8 since they are generally not important enough.

Conclusion

Guild Wars 2 still does not have a release date as of now, and the general consensus believes the game will not launch until Q3 of 2012.  From the observation of this BWE, I fully agree that it will take even the best team over two months to finish polishing this game to a releasable state.  Guild Wars 1 has been a polished product since long time ago, so I don’t have a reason to doubt ArenaNet’s ability as of now.  The next BWE will be the golden opportunity to evaluate ArenaNet’s progress, and until then, I consider my pre-purchase still a money well spent for all the other good qualities of this game.

After years of waiting, TERA is finally opening its doors to North American players.  This game has been quite newsworthy lately: Not only it has promised a combat system of the next generation of MMO, its history of controversies both in its country of origin and here in the States attracted a lot of media attention within the MMO sphere.  Yet no amount of good hype, bad press, and other kinds of controversies will deter the Tera’s impending launching on May 1st, whose success will then depend on the game’s real quality rather than any passing of words.  As the final beta period wraps up past weekend, it is time to passing down some verdicts in before the game goes live.

Controversies

Before we begin the beta gameplay stuff, for record keeping purposes, I’ll briefly cover the three most significant controversies around this Tera prior to its North American release.

1. NCSoft lawsuit drama

Disclaimer: I’m no legal expert, nor am I able to confirm the original Korean sources that are involved.  There has been a lot of news report on these lawsuits as of late, and it is difficult to tell which of them are factual and which of them are generated by the NCSoft and Bluehole’s PR machines.

Long story short: former Lineage 3 developers from NCSoft stole that game’s source code and left the company.  Later they were criminally convicted for that.  Sometime along the two events, these developers found Bluehole Studios and incorporated much of the original Lineage 3 concept to what we now know as Tera.  Not surprisingly, NCSoft sued Bluehole Studio.  Although the Korean Supreme Court declared the individuals responsible for stealing the software guilty, charges against Bluehole by NCSoft are largely overturned, so TERA can and will continue to exist (at least in Korea) for the time being.  A brief timeline of the litigation from mmoculture.com has some basic information, although it has several key events only vaguely described.

On the other hand, a report from thisisgame.com appears more credible.  It clearly and simply stated the results of the Korean lawsuits.

Years have gone by, and as En Masse Entertainment (Tera NA publisher) brought the game to closed beta, NCWest filed a complaint against EME in a New York court, on ground of the game has been allegedly developed based on stolen source code from NCSoft’s, whose profit will be unfairly breached by Tera’s inception in the West.  NCSoft’s wording in the complaint, which has been called a thinly disguised press release that anyone can download and read, made it clear that Tera contains inexcusable amount of similarity in its concept design to that of Lineage 3’s.

Offstage from the legal drama, an ugly fight between En Masse/Bluehole fanboys and haters, predictably.  But despite all these drama, the game’s NA launch date will remain firm and unaffected.  At last, even though Bluehole and En Masse may escape the burning breath of NCSoft, Tera will be forever branded a “stolen game that was Lineage III”.

2. Elin and Censorship

It is commonly known that many “cartoony” Asian MMO feature entire populations of player characters and NPC looking like preteens, the loli childlike race of Elin in Tera has brought an excessive amount of scrutiny to the game.  Many people were upset, and the term “pedophile” was flying around instigating all sorts of flames.

Here’s a good quote that sums up my feeling on the topic:

Posted: Feb 14th 2012 6:03PM

Primal Zed said

I think what a lot of people either ignore or just haven’t seen in regards to TERA’s hypersexualization is that it goes beyond what you can get from just screenshots of the game. Combat animations also accentuate the focus on sexualization: characters stick their ass out while running and jumping, belly dance while casting, engage in full pelvic thrusts while shooting a bow. The extra-controversial Elin race has a very noticeable hip sway as their standard combat-ready animation. It’s that kind of thing that makes me wonder whether the people who are saying it’s no worse than other games are actually doing an objective comparison.

To me, a fundamental mismatch in perspectives is what’s causing all these shenanigans.  Here’s a selection of Tera’s ESRB rating:

Several environments depict large pools of blood on the ground or covering torture devices. Some female characters wear revealing outfits that expose large amounts of cleavage and buttocks; their breasts occasionally bounce while running and jumping, and players have the ability to manipulate camera angles for zoomed-in views.

Although I agree there is an excessive amount of sexualization of character design in Tera, I am neither bothered by it, nor am I able to draw a sensible parallel between Tera and real pornographic that everybody (and certain minority) would enjoy.  I wish both sides can accept the simple reality that yes, this game sexualized many character models, including Elin, and no, not everyone who buys and plays the game are perverts and pedophiles.

3. The State of the Game

Ever wondered what made En Masse to take so long to “westernize” Tera?  The primary reason is that the game was released with (allegedly) not enough stuff to do at high levels, thus the Korean and Japanese players soon found the game to expressed their boredom with canceling their subscription.  Although lacking of end-game content is one of the more serious problems an MMO can have, it probably is a less concern for me as I rarely reach the end-game level in most MMORPG I’ve played.  Obviously, having open beta level capped at Lv32 does is not informative on whether En Masse “westernized” a good amount of high level content for us NA players that will prevent this game flop again in here.  Only time will tell.

A related note: Tera will launch without Battleground, aka pvp arena, until late summer. I found the news quite unnerving, since team arena format in any MMORPG is supposed to provide a more organized, ranked, and a level playing field for the participants.  Lastly, due to the uncanny scaling of character’s level to their comparative strength, I can only hope some kind of normalization makes its way to those more controlled pvp formats.

Beta

Don’t ask me why… I made the exact same character twice: first in CBT4 and then in OBT.  I guess I just really like Popori, and the Mystic class.  Got to lv30 in CBT4, and lv32 (cap) at OBT (and with 40/4 crab suppression orders completed for those who know what I’m talking about

Aesthetics

Although this game is a gorgeous eye-candy to many people, I am of the unfortunate minority who cannot  see the awesomeness due to a texture resolution bug.  For some unknown reason the game’s texture will quickly deteriorate from good quality resolution to an extremely crappy version.  Efforts gone to tweaking both in-game and outside of the game settings did not help.  Neither did the current knowledge base nor the responses from my support tickets provide any solution, yet.  I suspect the game engine’s automatic quality reduction mechanism is broken, as my rig has no problem running Battlefield 3 in high settings. (Though with 100% CPU and GPU usage, yet Tera only utilizes about 80% of the resources most of them time, yet the deterioration still happens.)

But for the brief glimpses of high quality texture that was visible to me, the beauty are in the details–the equipment on characters have very detailed models and textures.  Everything else, such as the color scheme, background, aerial and water reflection, coupled with fancy post-processing, look vibrant and immersing.  Those who played Aion before could immediately pick up the similarity in the art style.  However, compare to Aion, Tera does seem to lack in equipment model variety somewhat.  Many armors and weapons look exactly the same except the color.

Tera’s game client offers a good range of graphics settings to cater players using different rigs.  It looks like current generation of graphics card, ranging from medium to highest, all have their own optimal set of graphic options in the game.  There are several options to limit amount of rendered objects on screen, such as maximum amount of displayed players, reduced special effects, and background object visible range, to allow even more fine tuned experience.  Sadly for me, though, I’ll have to resolve the daunting texture bug to further dive into these.

BGM tracks in Tera are generally pleasant.  Most of them are top quality orchestral pieces that enhances the mood of the scenery, or bumping up the blood during a boss fight.  Though Tera doesn’t loop BGM indiscriminately (<- a source of annoyance), it does not have a jukebox feature to give players more freedom on what music they’d like to hear.

About the voice acting… Horrendous in the closed beta, and only a slightly better in the late open beta.  The biggest problem is the diminutive bank of voice clips on any NPC, and the general bad voice actors whose quality makes me suspect that En Masses just invited their employees’ and their relatives and friends to do the voice acting.  Not sure if there is an option to turn off NPC voices, but I don’t want to mute the voice overs in cut scenes as well.

Gameplay

Taunting a “true action combat”, Tera’s combat system is no doubt more dynamic and action-y than most MMORPG.  Doing away with tab targeting and put emphasize on players ability to aim is definitely a welcoming change from the norm.  The system is extremely engaging, and it has the potential to make a lot of typical mundane and grindy activities in traditional MMORPG more exciting.  Although there are not many playable classes to choose from, all of them provide a largely unique play style than the others.  Starting in early levels, players are given numerous skills to play around with.  Although skills are relatively easy to acquire and to use them in combat, the spatial and temporal awareness of players will say a lot about their combat efficiency.

Main focus involving combat seems to be instances, BAM (big ass boss monsters on open fields), and some forms of PvP (which I did not touch during the beta).  Quest chains lead players into exploring new zones and to decimate new monster populations; they are providing an extremely streamlined leveling experience.  The instances are fun, as even the low level ones can be approached in non-linearly fashions to encourage different strategy and tactics.  A delicate balance among soloable content to those that require a full group of 5.  Players on both sides of the casual solo vs hardcore raiders can find their own fun in this game.

Gathering and crafting is worth mentioning.  Gathering in Tera is much like in Aion, where resource nodes pop up on fields that players can interact with.  It is only better–group members can share the same node, and a successful gathering applies a random buff on the player that result in synergies between killing monsters and taking occasion breaks while gathering.  Tera’s crafting is also a lot like that of Aion.  Unfortunately, given the short length of beta, it is still too early to tell how crafting affects the overall economy.

Staying true to the MMO formula, PvP in Tera is just as important as its PvE.  As I stated earlier, however, I did not find the chance go into depth on the game’s PvP aspect during beta.  The political system–a more distinct feature that has been heavily advertised, was not in beta at all.  It’ll be interesting to see how it will turn out once the game launches.

Quests and Storytelling

As much as I’d like to praise the game’s combat for refreshing breeze, the questing and storytelling of Tera do not share the same praise by any extension.  New players get to experience their class at lv20 right after character creation as a prologue and to kick off the main plot.  Unfortunately, that prologue is the most interesting part of the plot as my lv32 self can tell.  Coupled with bad voice acting, the cut scenes are way too cheesy and sometimes are downright confusing.  The main story is mediocre at best, and the corresponding storyline quests show a minimal amount of effort from the developers to the point that I can barely call it plot progression.

Side quests are a bigger disappointment.  80% of them are “go kill 10 x/retrieve 10 x by killing y” type of quest that provide a lackluster background setting for why I have to kill what I need to kill.  Yes, I’ve read all the NPC dialog and that’s why I’m saying this.  Making the matter worse, all races and classes get the same set of quests with virtually no deviation–one less to create alts in a class-restricted MMO is… bad.

Anyway, this may or may not an issue to everyone, as most MMORPG (especially the F2P ones) have equally dull story and quests.  I’m just throwing it out here so people can properly lower their expectation in Tera at this department.

Community and Customer Support

Except for the outlier MMO games, such as Eve Online or WoW, reviews, be it casual or professional in nature, rarely discuss the quality of the game’s community.  When the community is mentioned, most of them are praises (unless, of course, it is Eve Online).  I find it strange.  I would not hesitate to criticize or praise a game, and I certainly would not hesitate to do the same to evaluate its community, since the community is an integral part of all MMO games and should be part of reasons that anybody would play an MMO in the first place.

A less-than-pretty common belief is that we, the MMO gamers, are not an exemplary helpful bunch on the Internet.  (Is there anyone?)  So far according to my observation, Tera is no different in this aspect than any other MMO, which features a full spectrum of flaming trolls on the forum to those who quietly helping strangers in game.  It is inevitable for a heavily anticipated game like Tera to attract a lot of undesired elements to its forums.  Apart from a few good guides and informative posts, most threads are filled with replies involving trolling, flaming other users, and flaming other games.  Unlike Eve Online, Tera’s forum posters are more likely to defend and support EME and Bluehole (sometimes in rabid fanboy manners).

Nothing special here, of course, as I’m foreseeing once the game goes live and the freeloaders are off the wagon, worthless posts will reduce in ratio to the ones that are actually worth reading.

Again, it is not surprising to find the in-game community is much friendlier compare to the forums.  Once out of the beginner island, I found myself doing much less /faceplam at the Area Chat.  When people are asking questions, they are generally answered.  The few pug dungeon and BAM groups I’ve been to are cool and offered polite feedback on how to improve people’s gameplay.  However, I would imagine PvP server would be a whole different story.

On terms of customer support, I am glad to see that EME spent some effort building up a knowledge base of official answers to frequently asked questions.  I earlier mentioned the texture bug; I have been communicating with a GM via the tickets.  Although I got a first response quickly, it was a semi-automated message and only after a few back and forth, the GM finally understood my problem if he was to thoroughly read my initial ticket, and the link to the similar problem from another user’s report.

Conclusion

I actually by pre-ordering Tera’s Digital Collector Edition after open beta regardless of its flaws, and I am fully intended to spend time playing its first month, despite the oncoming final exams and Guild Wars 2 beta weekends.  Tera is a colorful game with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses.  Being an Asian game in art style will definitely alienate some but attract others.  It is a game that has been polished over and over again via the (rather cheesy, imo) “westernization” slogan that may or may not change some people’s prejudice against Tera.  I suppose it’s not entirely a bad thing to make a swift decision on whether to pay for a game only for its few properties.  Hopefully anyone who was not sure had a taste in one of the beta weekends, or gathered enough information from other ways to make an informed decision.

Lastly, for anyone who is curious, my character name is Doggystyle, and I’m in the Dragonfall server.

Battlefield 3 received a big patch a month ago which rebalanced a tons of stuff.  Good to know that most changes are positive, but I then had to readjust play style to the post-patch gameplay.  Many accessories on guns act differently post-patch.  I had to dig around the wall-of-text patch note on my own, and then conduct much testing that I WISH THIS ARTICLE WAS THERE BEFORE I HAD TO DO THAT.

http://blogs.battlefield.com/2012/04/inside-dice-perfect-setup/

READ IT. IT WILL HELP YOU! (Especially if you want to be a lazy ass like me

Spring!  New anime season!  It’s unloading the old gear and picking up the new ones for me… so naturally, a recap and preview needs to happen.  Although I’m not reliving the past when I was following 11 anime at the same time, this spring does offer quite a few new concepts while saying farewell (and something less courteous) to the concluded ones.

Finished

2011 winter’s anime are rather unremarkable–if not disappointing.  The few high profile titles turned out to be crappy, yet there are still some good ones that I enjoyed… and let’s start with those…

The Good

Daily Lives of High School Boys (男子高校生の日常)

Tsukkomi-based humor is not new, yet the manga’s brilliant execution of it cracked me up numerous times.  I was happy to learn the anime adaptation became a reality but I kept my expectation at a reasonable level.  Then it’s good to know that the anime turned out better than I had expected.  An important factor for its success comes from its talented voice actors, where the audio transcription of the characters’ speech made easier to understand some of the more obscure jokes.  A pack of famous voice actors always help the cause.

I realized that this anime is the masculine(?) version of Nichijou.  No wonder I like it so much.

Nisemonogatari (偽物語)

Same as its prequel Bakamonogatari, this anime is a showcase of what to expect from Director Shinbou Akiyuki.  The fact that this anime requires previous knowledge of the series does not overshadow it’s high quality.  I suppose Shinbou’s style is “love it or hate it” kind of deal, and being a novel adaptation, the plot is guaranteed not to suck at very least.  Nothing more need to be said, other than if you are a fan of Shinbou, or the original novel, Nisemonogatari will not disappoint you.

The Better

Another

Another novel adaption that finally earned itself a place in TV anime.  The mystery genre is my cup of tea, so I picked this one up naturally.  My assumption of a good plot is proven to be correct, where Director Mizushima and studio P. A. Works excelled in making this dark-mood anime with the a classic occult mystery approach.  Unlike some other mysteries I encountered lately, this one features a very satisfying ending (which from what I hear, deviates from the original novel ending a bit).  For those who like mystery/horror kind of stuff, and those would smile at “artful” ways of killing off characters, Another is a must-watch.

Inu x Boku SS (妖狐×僕SS)

At start I didn’t know what to expect.  Is this another moeblob anime that worth none of my time, or did I knock on the wrong door that is intended for fangirls audience only?  The answer is no to both questions.  Once into episode 2, Inu x Boku is no doubt a comedy, with a target audience covering both spectra of male vs female fanservices and normal vs hentai needs.  It looks like the original manga is still ongoing, and the ending of anime is strongly hinting for a next season.

Let it come soon, please.

The Bad

Last Exile  –Ginyoku no Fam– (ラストエグザイル-銀翼のファム-)

Preemptive tl;dr: Fuck you, GONZO.  Fuck you for discarding everything good about series and filled it up with crappy nonsense.

Considering Last Exile 1st season is of one of my favorite anime, my expectation is high for the second season.  Yet all I have seen is pure fail.  The contrast of quality of the plot between the first and second season is appalling: in season 1, the plot progressed as protagonists becomes mature when they are brought into larger conflicts of the world, yet Ginyoku no Fam shows a twisted setting where as the young heroines step into a war, and then all the politicians and military leaders suddenly rolled back their mental age to same level as the heroines.

I’ll learn my lesson here after what GONZO did to Last Exile and to a lesser extend, Tower of Druaga, where then only fucked up the 2nd season’s ending instead of the entire 2nd season.

Black Rock Shooter (TV) (ブラック★ロックシューター TV)

This is less of a fail than Ginyoku no Fam, but a fail nonetheless.  Since I never watched the BRS’s OVA nor did I play the game, I don’t know how much I can relate this anime to its Vocaloid root.  The animation, special effects, voice acting, and many aspects of this anime are well above average, yet for some reason, the plot is just messed up, literally.  Yes, I know the meta-world (where girls’ inner persona are playing endless fighting games) is supposed to be an abstraction of their emotions… but is it really the only thing the anime is able to convey?  With the exception of Mado the protagonist, most other characters are mentally unstable adolescents in need of institutionalized treatment.

So yeah, they had their “episodes”, and in the end Mado magically solves all the problems and (wtf) a happy ending ensues.  This anime is the reason I won’t look forward to anime that are spinoffs from songs.

On Air Now

This spring looks promising to become my personal “spring” as for my interest in anime.  Other than Fate/Zero’s April continuation, many newcomers are pushing the boundary of “suspension of disbelief” further into the realm of wackiness.  After some sampling works,  this is my “currently following” list.

Upotte!! (うぽって!!)

A clarification up front: this is no Gunslinger Girls.  The girls in Upotte!! are, in fact, guns themselves.  Don’t ask me how it works, just watch it.

Anyway, this anime is pretty much a moe’d up introductory course on assault rifles (that use NATO ammo anyway for now)… A typical case of 1+1>2, as neither the fanservice-ladened moe nor the weaponry stuff is as interesting individually as they are combined.  A zany, lighthearted comedy without much story can’t go too wrong, right?  Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say this to the male teacher who improperly gunhandled one of the girls and got hospitalized

It’s very replenishing to watch this anime after hours of Battlefield 3.  And students be reminded, no live rounds in campus hallway.

Nazo no Kanojo X (謎の彼女X）

Despite the somewhat generic and uninspiring title–“Mysterious Girlfriend”–this anime contains materials that are anything but generic.  Though the art style feels incredibly 15-years-ago, it is nonetheless a heartwarming deviation from the current norm.  However, this anime is also a spitful: the central theme seem to revolve around the young couple’s daily exchange of… saliva.  The depiction of that is rather explicit and graphic–to the point that I have to look away, and laugh out loud.  Seriously.

True to the title, the revelation of the girlfriend’s “specialty” (apart from secretion of addictive saliva), is a kind of a plot twist which I will not spoil.  Verdict: Nazo no Kanojo X is a refreshing, yet sometimes disgusting craziness that I just can’t stop myself from wanting more of it.

Sankarea (さんかれあ)

Zombie survival horrors is a successful genre across multiple media, yet I can’t seem to find a real zombie anime that adheres to the formula.  I suppose it’s no secret for whom being the biggest offender.  Rest assured, Sankarea is still not a zombie survival horror–or at least not yet from the first few episodes, and not likely to become one.  It is rather going to the subtle route where certain people (and cat) die and reborn as zombies(?).  Since I have not touched on the original manga, I honestly cannot predict how the story will progress, since it has some heavier topics, such as abusive parenting.

A product of Studio DEEN, Sankarea’s animation quality is good.  Hopefully the plot goes not to the mundane but to something subliming.

Polar Bear’s Cafe (しろくまカフェ)

I think it’s now safe to call this anime my favorite April new show (hence the top image).  It features anatomically realistic animals hanging out in a cafe in a humanly fashion.  If you are like me, who is tired of seeing anime endlessly pumping out humanoid characters with only part of them are animal-inspired (namely ears and tails), Polar Bear’s Cafe is a true avant-garde, slice of (animals mocking human) life anime that is worth watching.

And a lot of famous people in the voice actor list btw.

Honorable Mentions

Fate/Zero   (caution: loud flash splash animation)

Technically not a new anime, Fate/Zero is set to dominate as it makes a triumph return in this season. Thanks to Uchiboro, I finally made a first step into the universe of Fate that this anime’s predecessor–Fate/Stay Night, failed to capture my interest.  Every aspect of Fate/Zero, such as story, music, voice acting, and animation, is top notch; comparing to ufotable’s Kara no Kyoukai, Fate/Zero’s quality transcendent its TV anime nature and into the realm of movies and OVA.

What’s even more amazing is that the anime is broadcasted worldwide on Niconico Douga in 8 languages, for free.  Although those subtitles are rather awkward and unrefined comparing to fansubs, it’s still a generosity from the producers which I am thankful of.  After all, the best anime of the season is obviously qualified to be aired worldwide.  Hopefully this gesture will be backed up by the global BR/DVD sales so to encourage more high production value anime instead of common cliched ones to be further produced in Japan.

Queen’s Blade — Rebellion

I watched the previous two seasons of Queen’s Blade and was awed by how good the story is.  I thought Queen’s Blade was one of the plethora of H-anime coming from Japan that are less worthy of watching… and I’m glad I was wrong.  The original anime went into depth with its plot, which is very rare given the large amount of  fanservices (that is it even rated M in Japan??).  Unfortunately, Rebellion has yet to show me the same quality in its story in par with its predecessors, so I am unsure whether I’ll keep following it to the end.

Conclusion

I don’t want to make a general statement saying that TV anime industry is revitalizing… Maybe it is, maybe it is not.  It is only an observation: animators are making a step out the stale pond to test some new water.  Definitely encouraging, and we can only wait and see how it turns out.

The “Disgraced” Mittani

The Eve Fanfest, hosted by CCP, is a yearly offline gathering (and drinking) event in the city of Reykjavik, Iceland.  It’s always been surprising for me, given CCP’s record of generating “controversies” among its players, yet each year’s Fanfest turned out to be a fabulous experience for all: CCP, the attenders, and the ordinary players and other media outlets.  There was no real-life version of ranting threadnaughts at interactions between the developers and attenders, nor there was equivalence of Jita Protest at the convention center (that I know of anyway).  It kinda makes sense, as who would really pay for a round trip to Iceland to protest about a game that they would have stopped playing already.  Instead of the tension between CCP and us Eve players, we get exciting news about what’s coming to our beloved game–for example, Fanfest 2012 has brought us one of the best Eve concept trailers.

The fragile tranquility has been broken at this year’s Fanfest.  To my surprise, though, not by a group of “bittervets” venting their anger at CCP.  The offender is The Mittani, chairman of the newly elected CSM member who received more votes than the next three candidates combined, for his gross misconduct  as he displayed the other extreme negativity that this game’s community is often accused of–the sadistic wish onto another Eve player.

What Is Going On

To save space, I won’t go into details of how The Mittani has attempted to rally others, on a live stream, to harass another Eve player in hope causing him to commit suicide.  The image above is supposed to be a private correspondence between the suicidal victim and The Mittani’s alliance, Goonswarm Federation.  To be fair, though, it is hard to tell whether the victimized miner who wrote the mail was really suicidal, or just really depressed and pissed off, or simply trolling.  Yet again, including this kind of material which could possibly describe some real suicidal thoughts–in a public presentation by the CSM chairman–is simply distasteful.

The real offense came in, as The Mittani gave out the miner’s in-game name in front of the camera, for the audience who “want to make the guy to kill himself”.  Jump to 1:12:00 of below video to hear The Mittani’s original lines.  (The slide shown in above image is around 1:02:00).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Ki91U-mBE

“Find him,” says The Mittani.  Indeed, it has found him: it being a shitstorm, and him is the sociopath chairman himself.  Since then, The Mittani has issued an “apology”.  Players have demanded his resignation from the CSM, while the tools from Goonswarm & Friends happily spammed the topics with brainless words, showing support to their Great Leader.

Climax happened when The Mittani finally issued his resignation from the CSM Chairman seat, and at the same time, referencing an apologetic blog entry about the hats he wears.  Two hours later, a GM made an announcement, where CCP recognizes The Mittani’s resignation from the chairmanship, in addition to ban The Mittani’s Eve account for 30 days for his violation of the EULA, which effectively removing him from the CSM council and not just his chairmanship.  Adding a highly needed hand of salt to the wound, The Mittani’s further chance of running for CSM will be placed under CCP’s review.

Why do I care?

I don’t care what Goonswarm does in Eve, and I don’t care how those who never played Eve would like to generalize us Eve players from the silly stuff the Goons do.  I don’t care about the Goonswarm leader stroking his e-peen in front of a camera to entertain those who find it entertaining, nor do I really care about a bitter miner’s words after getting ganked by those would mercilessly troll on whatever he would say to them.

What I do care is when the chairman of CSM could get away with encouraging others to harass another Eve player so he can kill himself.  Albeit I did not vote for this sociopath for the current CSM election, the massive amount of votes he did received put him into a unique position–a position that enabled him to bring shame and disgrace not only to himself, but also (possibly) his voters, the CSM, Eve Online, CCP, and most importantly, the Eve Community as a whole.

And his “apology” post doesn’t help at all.  All he said was basically: “Hey, I am sorry now after I found out the shit really hit the fan.  There was no excuse for what I did but hey, I was drunk, you know.  I also am glad to find the guy didn’t really kill himself after my people started blowing him up, so I’ll send him some ISK.”  As an Eve player who knows words (especially ones like these) are always cheap, the fact that he did not resign from CSM (or at least his chairmanship) right away tells enough about incentive behind his “apology”–to hold dear the power and perks CCP has granted him as the top CSM council member.

CCP is far from blameless in the same regard.  Their initial inane statement (in italic, starts from “CCP in no way condones the harassment of players”) would not realize into action, if not for the negative PR attention and pressure from the gaming sites.  Although for CCP to remove The Mittani from CSM means they would be invalidating the votes of over 10k Eve subscriptions, which could be better handled in a bonus election only open to those who voted for the now-uncloseted sociopath, etc.

Although I place my point of view in this matter as a generic Eve player, who doesn’t feel ruining others’ gameplay means the same thing as enriching my own,  yet as a w-space resident, I must voice disappointment of Two step, the CSM member who championed himself the “wormhole guy”, would rather let The Mittani stay in power.  Funnily enough, it now partly makes me glad for not voting for him during the election.

I guess we can always learn something from downfall of some public figures.  We all wear hats.  I could think my hat is prettier than yours.  This incident should serve as a warning to those who allow their hats to become them, as when someone failed to realize that he’s actually naked instead of wearing any hat at all.

DUST 514 Video Game, GDC 2012: Game To Game Interaction Interview HD | Video Clip | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com.

Damn.  Even though I don’t plan to get a PS3 but this game indeed excites me.  I don’t know how many free-to-play FPS games are on PS3 but I would definitely check it out if I have a PS3.  And as an Eve fan, I’m obligated to demand a PC release of this game sometime within a year of its console debut :p

A fearful thing happened on Tuesday. Woke up, resume my desktop from sleep, prepared to leave for classes, then noticed the the PC is off again.  It surely was not a power outage, because then the computer would turn on when I pressed the power button again…

This is one of the “oh shit” moment I really do not like to see.  Especially not knowing that I have to leave in 10 minutes and cannot fix it until I get back.

As anxiety lingered for the entire day as I explored my options.  I have a netbook capable of playing Guild Wars and could let me do Planetary Interaction in Eve Online–that’s about all I have been doing lately.  And a Nook Color is by my side, running the best Android mod, which I used to write most of this post for. Last but not least, a Samsung Galaxy phone with better hardware than the Nook Color but with less favorable screen size.

The PSU’s connectors had trouble interfacing with the grandmotherboard before, and if it was indeed the same issue, 15 minutes is the maximum amount of time I need to fix it.  Surely if the PSU is to die all the important stuff (CPU, graphics card, and hard drive) would preserve, right?

After a closer inspection, I confirmed the issue is not the connectors: the PSU sparked and emitted a familiar smell when I fiddle with it.

That was definitely what I hoped for but definitely not the worst thing that could happen.  My “backup” power supply is a 460 watt CoolMaster, and it appeared that she could not produce enough juice to satisfy the thirst of my quad core CPU and GTX460.  Though after downgrading back to my old 9500GT (and unplugged a number of peripherals), the damn machine finally booted normally.

A lesson is learned: don’t buy a cheap PSU of an unknown brand and hope it will last.  The replacement: A Rosewill Green Series PSU, 530 watt with active PFC for $50.  Given the amount of good ratings it has on Newegg, I feel it will outperform its predecessor in both longevity and delivering enough power to all the USB connections, which the dead PSU did not do well on.

It is definitely infuriating and inexcusible to notice my domain name expired once again.  Apparently, it is the price I have to pay for not checking my email over the weekend… I call it BS, as the plug was pulled only one day after the initial bill was sent to me from my webhosting company, ByetHost.

If you faintly (or vividly) feels familiarity in this event, then let me confirm the deja vu to be justified.  As a mean to stop this “annual facepalm event” to incur more humility, I have made some arrangement.

It is called automatic domain name renewal. I hope it will do the trick.

龙年快乐！

I was wondering whether I came out of closet–of being a fanboy of ArenaNet.  Looking back to my last Guild Wars post, the answer is yes.  Oh and, in case you wonder, this post is about Guild Wars 2 release date! (True Story!)

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Source: ArenaNet blog

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I won’t be part of the “select press” (read: various MMO news/review sites), so I’ll bet my luck on March and April of 2012… to say “bet my luck” is accurate since this is not an announcement of an open beta.  It is cleared up in this thread on GW2 Guru forum by the developer guy who wrote the post: the term “open beta” is purposely avoid as currently ArenaNet are not arranging a play session open for “anybody on the interwebs”.  The speculation seems to be that there will be preview weekends where the game opens up a selected area for a greater audience to participate.

This of course does not mean there will be no open beta (in its contemporary meaning) for GW2.  It is possible the OB will come shortly before the game releases.

And for original Guild Wars, things have been fun.  A recent update to Elementalist profession skills finally convince me to start playing it once again.  The reason being my main character (albeit my only active character to play for the purpose of casually filling up Hall of Monuments), is indeed an Elementalist.  For a long time in GW’s metagame, Ele’s role in parties (in difficult PvE areas) is not the DD/Spiker despite the original intent of the developers and the general perception of “mages” in RPG.  This update made some remedy to that; by buffing Ele elite skills, ArenaNet gave Elementalists more options in building skill bars.  Although it did not made Ele the new “OP class”, the update rejuvenated the game’s metagame–something the Elementalist profession really needed.

My last hiatus took place before some of other good changes in Guild Wars: team of 7 heroes, and Guild Wars Beyond’s Cantha installation: Winds of Change.  From point of view of a GW lore fan, I feel WoC’s story has not been very interesting compare to the earlier chapters (War in Kryta and Hearts of the North).  ANet seems to have shift their focus to GW2 to the point that WoC story has not concluded for months… something I hope will change along the recent frequent skill updates.

Despite the definite areas of potential improvement, Guild Wars being the source of its sequel’s hype is entirely justified.  The game is unique and a classic in many aspects within the online/MMO/RPG industry.  I highly recommend full purchase ($30+$20 USD for the Trilogy and Eye of the North expansion) of this game for anyone who don’t hate role-playing games.

「生存戦略、しましょうか」

Not going into the details which I’m sure you’d heard about it more or less.  I’m here only to say: Thank you, wikipedia, for risking your reputation to stand up against the Evil that is breeding in the US Congress before it becomes too late.  You are not only fighting for your own survival, but much of the whole Internet.